ANSWERS TO YOUR QUESTIONS

GENERAL QUESTIONS

What is Cloudsurance™ ?

Cloudsurance™ is the world's first cloud insurance program for cloud consumers, designed to provide financial protection against downtime, cyber-attack and data loss. SMB´s are increasingly relying on cloud computing, but this reliance can come with costly losses, either from electronic data breaches or data center downtime stemming from physical damage and Cloudsurance™ is designed to mitigate against such perceived risks and hedge against the inherent risks in cloud computing.

Over the last decade we have seen a rapid adoption of cloud services across all business sectors, over the next decade adoption of cloud computing is set to increase dramatically, but this shift in emphasis from the tangible assets (buildings/machinery) in a business, to its intangible assets (data/desktops/servers/applications) has taken traditional insurance providers by surprise. Cloudsurance™ was designed to address a growing gap in the cloud insurance market and provide much needed cloud insurance coverage to businesses that directly expose themselves to financial risk, through their consumption of cloud services.

Why do I need Cloudsurance ?

Whilst most cloud service providers are protected by some form of cyber insurance, this protection is usually put in place for the benefit of the cloud provider, coverage does not extend to the cloud consumer and their financial protection is non-existent. A data breach claim for a cloud provider is really just an errors and omissions (E&O) claim, the cloud provider usually has no direct liability to their customers whose cloud based assets have been breached, even if they are legally liable for failing to keep the customers’data, desktops, servers and applications secure. We designed Cloudsurance™ to extend financial protection to cover the cloud consumer, providing cloud insurance which directly protects their cloud based assets against cyber risk.

Cloudsurance™ is designed for organizations who are reliant on cloud technology and who would be seriously affected financially should their cloud service providers’ data centers go offline because of a fire, major storm, vandalism, sprinkler leakage and other physical damage. Cloudsurance™ is also for cloud service providers who may incur major financial losses should downtime, data loss or cyber attack occur and directly affect their own customers.

How can I buy Cloudsurance ?

Cloudsurance™ is only available through our cloud provider partner network, accredited partners who have passed through our rigorous accreditation process. Because Cloudsurance™ is designed to protect against failings in a cloud providers service, we must first make sure that cloud providers we accredit for coverage are following best practices in areas like disaster recovery, data encryption and cyber security. Before we accredit a cloud provider, we conduct a rigorous audit of the providers facilities, finances, employees, internal processes and practices.

Who is behind Cloudsurance ?

Cloudsurance™ is backed by a consortium of cloud service providers, cloud security and compliance practitioners, consisting of the primary stakeholders, Saca Technologies, Iron Orbit, tuCloud and TrueDefense, and our secondary stakeholders, consisting of mostly mostly private, sophisticated and high net worth investors.

Cloudsurance™ was first conceived by Alexander Saca and Guise Bule, who after operating cloud computing businesses for a decade, were unable to secure adequate cloud insurance protection for their own cloud customers. Whilst insurance designed to protect cloud providers from various risks did exist, this insurance did not extend to their own customers, or address any of the very specific risks that cloud consumers face, so they set out to create the world's first cloud insurance program, designed for cloud consumers and to protect their own customers.

Who underwrites Cloudsurance ?

Cloudsurance™ is is directly underwritten by the consortium backing Cloudsurance™, they provide the financial backing necessary to underwrite any potential claims. In addition to the fifty million dollars worth of coverage underwritten directly by the consortium, consortium members are themselves individually insured at varying levels with up to fifty million dollars of coverage on technology errors and omissions, media liability, intellectual property infringement, data protection and cyber liability, ensuring that collectively and individually we are well protected financially against all contingencies.

COVERAGE QUESTIONS

How does your data loss protection work ?

The average organizational cost of a data breach in the US is $5.85 million (Ponemon Institute, LLC, “2014 Cost of Data Breach Study: Global Analysis,” May 2014). Cloudsurance™ provides more than enough coverage to protect you against even the worst data loss disaster. Our data loss protection is designed to compensate you financially should the worst occur and some, or all, of your cloud based data is somehow lost. We define lost data as data which has become unrecoverable from physical hard drives and where no back up of the data exists. Should the worst occur and a physical accident, malicious attack or act of nature destroys your cloud based data, we will compensate you up to five million dollars, depending on your level of coverage.

How does your down time protection work ?

In the last 25 months, 91% of data centers have experienced an outage of some description that resulted in downtime (Ponemon Institute, LLC, “2013 Cost of Data Center Outages,” December 2013) although to look at the industry standard SLA uptime level of 99.99%, downtime is something that hardly ever happens. The highest recorded cost of a single event associated with data center downtime was $1.7 million and based on this figure, Cloudsurance will compensate you up to two million dollars depending on your level of coverage, in the event downtime affecting your business for an unreasonable period of time.

How does your cyber-attack protection work ?

It is incredibly difficult to quantify the long term costs of a cyber-attack and when assessing the financial impact of a cyber attack it is necessary to evaluate a series of factors, such as the loss of intellectual property and sensitive data, opportunity costs (including service and employment disruptions), damage to the brand image and company reputation, cost of mitigation strategies and recovery from attacks and intangible factors such as loss of overall competitiveness. Because of this, we limit coverage to a flat payment up to one million dollars depending on your level of coverage, should a cyber attack occur, ensuring that you are financially compensated against some of the inevitable costs should a cyber attack ever affect your business.

SUPPORT QUESTIONS

How does your disaster recovery support work ?

Our disaster recovery support services are designed to be an extension of our cloud insurance coverage. We provide dedicated disaster recovery support and teams of experienced cloud technicians in times of crisis to help you with any cloud computing disaster that affects your cloud hosted data, desktops, applications or servers. In the event of a total cloud-provider failure, our teams will move quickly to secure and restore access to your critical cloud based assets and in a real emergency, migrate your cloud based operation to a safe haven. An experienced Cloudsurance™ team of IT First Responders will provide constant 24/7/365 support to help you through a cloud hosting disaster.

How does your cloud migration support work ?

Cloudsurance™ can provide you with an emergency migration team to assist in your migration from one provider to another. If you need to suddenly migrate large amounts of users (and their data, desktops and applications) from one cloud hosting provider to another, it can be an incredibly daunting and complex task, especially when one of the providers is being unhelpful. Cloudsurance™ Migration Teams ensure that the migration of your users, data and infrastructure is handled efficiently, competently and securely. We provide dedicated migration teams, made up of experienced cloud technicians in times of crisis to help you migrate your cloud hosted assets from one provider to another.

FURTHER QUESTIONS

Where can I sign up for Cloudsurance ?

Cloudsurance™is only available through our network of accredited cloud service providers, it is not available for purchase with any other cloud provider or service. You can buy Cloudsurance™ as part of your hosting package with the accredited cloud provider that you choose out of our network. We will be constantly adding cloud service providers to our network throughout 2015 and accrediting them individually to become Cloudsurance providers, keep checking back to see our network expand.

What is Cloudsurance Best Practice™ ?

Cloudsurance Best Practice™ is a certification program through which accredited Cloudsurance providers must first pass, before they begin to offer Cloudsurance as a product to their own cloud customers. Cloudsurance Best Practice™ ensures that a cloud service providers security, operational and management practices go above and beyond what is usually considered best practice. Best practice is a feature of accredited management standards such as ISO 9000 and ISO 14001 and we seek to impose these kinds of practices on cloud service providers who wish to provide cloud insurance coverage to their own customers. In doing so, we increase standards in cloud computing, reduce our own financial risks when providing coverage to cloud consumers and raise the overall standard of cloud hosted services in general, where Cloudsurance Best Practice™ leads, others will follow.

Which cloud providers currently offer Cloudsurance™ ?

Cloudsurance™ is currently available through four cloud service providers, these are Saca Technologies, Iron Orbit, OnTheNetOffice and tuCloud, you can buy Cloudsurance as an optional extra whenever you buy cloud services from those providers, just as you would purchase insurance when you rent a car from a car rental agency.

Can I talk to you about Cloudsurance™ ?

Certainly, you can contact us by email, or you can call us up with any questions that you may have. Our email address is info@cloudsurance.com and our telephone number is (888) 769-7797.

As a cloud provider, how can I offer Cloudsurance™ to my own customers ?

Please get in touch with us and have a conversation, we are actively looking to increase the size of our accredited provider network and widen the reach Cloudsurance™ has amongst cloud consumers, please contact our partner relations team using partner@cloudsurance.com.

Will Cloudsurance become available for use with Amazon / Azure / Salesforce ?

Yes, we are aiming for a Q3 2015 general release of Cloudsurance™ availability and coverage for the largest cloud providers on the market (Amazon / Azure / Salesforce) regardless of their accreditation status with us as partners. We ultimately intend to provide Cloudsurance™ coverage of all major cloud providers, covering most kinds of cloud services and platforms.

Cloud insurance coverage for Amazon will come first, followed by cloud insurance protection for Azure and Salesforce customers later in the year, although this will be a more basic form of coverage (compared to our more comprehensive accredited cloud provider coverage), it will provide much needed basic cloud insurance coverage to cloud consumers who are left exposed by large cloud providers who are failing to provide even basic financial protection to their own customers.